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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: DACs using SPDIF are broken by design

When you are all done with this Wave IO setup, how much did you spend on it, power supplies, cables and whatever extra accessories might be needed?

Did this setup provide better isolation from the computer than running USB directly to the DAC? Do software and hardware changes to your computer have as much effect with this extra box in between the DAC?

My comments about SPDIF stand. The design is defective and inappropriately cheap. The use of multiplexed clock and data creates jitter problems that would simply not exist with a dedicated clock line, for example with I2S. Better is for the clock to originate at the DAC. This is an option with I2S. It is possible to build good implementations of a poor architecture that beat poor implementations of a good architecture.

The complexity of USB (A camel is a horse designed by a committee.) makes implementations in DACs noisy unless extra cost is spent on power supplies and isolation. It also makes it likely that many implementations will be poor, if only because the designers attention span isn't long enough to take in the entire specification. (I found it very time consuming to get an answer to a simple question from the USB specification.)



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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